By Nury Vittachi

Monday, 08 March 2010

A diary of agony

They say exercise adds years to your life. Yep, I feel ten years older

MARATHON RUNNING has come to Asia. This bizarre Western craze has four fun stages:

1) You run.

2) You have a heart attack.

3) You die and you’re buried.

4) You get this really cool medal bearing the word “failed”.

Sounds fun, right? I thought so too.

Woohoo, gimmee a piece of that. * Next month, a marathon is to be held in North Korea. The rules are a bit different there. Runners who fail to finish will be processed into kimchee and fed to hungry people (the Dear Leader and his fat children). * Your humble narrator signed up to run a 21 kilometer race in Hong Kong.

“Not all of you will die of heart attacks,” the trainer told us. “Only the fat lazy ones who have done almost no training.”

I put up my hand and said: “Excuse me sir. That IS all of us.”

He looked us up and down and said: “Oh yeah, that’s right.”

He made us sign what looked like a disclaimer but was really a will giving him all our worldly goods. Evil scum. * On the morning of the race, I was interested to see that instead of a starting gun, they had a machine that made a very loud farting sound. Or it may just have been the guy standing next to me.

Either way, everyone started to move: it seemed the wise thing to do.

I ran.

I flew along the streets.

My feet were a blur.

In fact, I can honestly say, the first part of the race was hugely enjoyable.

That euphoria lasted for quite a long distance, maybe 50 to 60 meters.

Then I got tired. “How much further is it to the end?” I asked the guy next to me.

He replied: “The end? We haven’t reached the starting line yet.” * Arrrggghhhhhh. That’s when I realized just how hard a marathon is.

I draw a veil over the misery that followed.

I dragging my aching bones along as far as I could.

Eventually, I ran completely out of breath.

At that point, I could see more than 1,000 runners in front me. SO depressing.

But at that moment, we reached a large U-turn sign. Huh?

We were channeled to the other side of the dual carriageway, facing the direction in which we’d come.

Yay! We were on the home stretch.

What I saw from that angle made my jaw drop. Yes, there were a thousand runners ahead of me—but there were many more thousands behind me, looking jealously in my direction.

I da man! My exhaustion vanished.

I picked up my feet.

I puffed out my chest.

I increased my speed.

That moment taught me that the ability to continue against the odds is not physical at all, but purely mental.

It also taught me that a man’s ego measures roughly 1,015 billion cubic kilometers, the size of Jupiter. * The organizer had thoughtfully supplied cheering fans.

At one corner was a girl clutching a single inflatable applause tool. What is the sound of one hand clapping? An embarrassed silence.

She stood glaring at us, a single horrifying thought filling her head: “Fifty thousand people are filing past me and every single one is thinking, Wow, is SHE dumb.” * I made it to the end without the promised heart attack. Maybe I’ll have better luck next time. *